


a good heart.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel is a cutie, Fallen Castiel, Human Castiel, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-05
Updated: 2013-08-05
Packaged: 2017-12-22 12:30:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’ve got a good heart, the old woman says to Cas, and he only ducks his head and gives her a sad, embarrassed little smile, but Dean hears her, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a good heart.

One day Dean looks at him and sees someone he doesn’t know.  

He might just be going crazy, Dean figures, because he’s still just Cas: nothing more, nothing less, even in the absence of his grace.  But there’s a certain unfamiliarity about him as well, from the jeans he’s wearing to the way he walks unerringly to the coffee aisle at the grocery store and picks out a French vanilla roast.  

He’s left standing in bewilderment when Cas leaves his side in a drenching rain to offer an elderly woman his umbrella instead; he’s startled by the gentle way Cas holds the fragile body of a half-drowned kitten they find in the drain outside their motel.  He doesn’t expect Cas to be at a loss for words when a mother of three thanks him for holding open the door, or to step out of the gas station convenience store only to discover that Cas has given away most of their cash so a teenager can buy a bus ticket back home. 

 _You’ve got a good heart_ , the old woman says to Cas, and he only ducks his head and gives her a sad, embarrassed little smile, but Dean hears her, too. 

A good heart, Dean thinks, when he wakes up to find that Cas has gone out for the morning but left him a bowl of slightly soggy cereal for breakfast.  A good heart, he thinks as he watches Cas carefully pick a toddler off the ground and place him on his feet.  

A good heart, he thinks, sitting alone one awful night at the hospital and sick with worry over Sam, when Cas shows up in the waiting room and silently sits down on the bench at his side, stiffly placing his arm around Dean’s shoulders and holding him like that for the rest of the night.

Take everything else away, and at his core, Cas is just plain  _good_.  

A good heart, Dean thinks, and it seems that it’s only now that he’s realizing its value.  It’s that good heart of Cas’s that Dean’s seeing for the first time, and of everything the universe has to offer, it’s Cas’s heart that Dean is discovering that he wants; Cas’s heart, above everything else.

Cas and that good heart of his, falling asleep on Dean’s shoulder, a guardian angel who still answers prayers even though he no longer hears any; Cas, who has never stopped looking out for him.  Cas, who doesn’t have the grace to refrain from saying  _I told you so_  at every available opportunity; Cas, who carries peppermints in his coat pockets and passes them out to little kids with tears and snot streaming down their faces.

That good heart, the one Dean’s never really noticed in Cas until now, the one that must’ve been there all along; a good heart that Dean’s never looked for.

If Dean had been looking all those years ago, before the way things broke between them, he might have found a good heart in the quiet man whose smiles are rare and hard-won, might’ve found him feeding doves on a bench in the park the way he did last Tuesday.

But he knows what to look for, now that he’s caught a glimpse of that good heart, and and as far as he can see all his days are made up of Cas, Cas, who talks to himself under his breath when he’s concentrating on a _New York Times_  crossword puzzle; Cas, bright-eyed and smiling quietly at Dean in the mornings; Cas, who gets self-conscious when Dean whistles at him after he puts on new clothes.

Yeah, Dean’s got a type. He’s got a thing for good hearts: hearts that are kind to strangers and rescue cats out of trees and give their best to save the world.  One heart in particular.  

"What’s this about?" Cas asks uncertainly, when Dean sits him down at a table by the cafe’s open window and buys him a cup of coffee.

There’s so much about that good heart he doesn’t know about yet.

“I want to get to know you better,” Dean tells him, and Cas smiles down at his coffee cup.  "Tell me about yourself."

“Well,” Cas hedges, “it might be a long story.”

He settles down in his chair, lets his knee rest against Cas’s under the table. “I’ve got time.”  


End file.
